A Promise Made With Someone Else’s House

In 1885, an Austrian writer named Nathan Birnbaum needed a word.

He wanted a name for an idea floating around Jewish communities in Europe. Jews should stop begging Europe to accept them, and go and build a country of their own. He took Zion, an ancient word for Jerusalem, and made a word out of it.

Zionism.

That’s where the name comes from. A writer inventing a label in Austria, thousands of kilometres from Palestine.

Not every Jew liked the idea. Plenty thought it was a fantasy.

Plenty of religious Jews thought it was actually forbidden. They believed God had sent the Jews away from that land long ago. One day God would bring them home again, at a time only God would choose. Men in Europe deciding to do it themselves was not faith. It was running ahead of God.

And plenty of others said, we are German, we are French, we are Polish, this is our home and we are not leaving.

The argument was loud and it went on for years.

Buying the ground

While that argument went on, something was already happening quietly in Palestine.

A French banker named Rothschild was one of the richest men in Europe, and from the 1880s he began spending his own fortune on buying land in Palestine and building Jewish farming villages on it. He paid for about thirty of them.

There is a word for villages like these. A settlement is a new village built on land that has been bought for people arriving from somewhere else. The people who move into one are called settlers. Remember both words. You will meet them on nearly every page from here on.

Rothschild is buried in Palestine today, in a tomb in the hills above one of the villages his money built. Israeli children are still taken there to learn about the men who paid for the beginning. It is a quiet place with a long view, and what you can see from it is land that changed owners while the families farming it had no idea.

But thirty villages is not a country. Getting a country would take something more than money.

Then a journalist wrote a book, and the argument changed.

The man with the plan

Theodor Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian journalist. Smart, stubborn, very good at getting attention. He had been in Paris for the trial you read about in the last chapter, and he had heard the crowds in the street screaming for Jewish blood, in a country that called itself modern. He came away with one conclusion.

Europe will never stop. Ever. So stop asking.

In 1896 he published a small book called The Jewish State. It was not poetry. It read like a business plan. Which company would move the people. How the land would be bought. What the flag might look like. Herzl believed a Jewish state would exist within fifty years, and he wrote the steps down like a man planning a railway.

He was almost exactly right about the fifty years.

In 1897 he sent invitations out across Europe, to Jewish leaders, rabbis, writers, doctors and businessmen. Anyone with money, influence, or a loud voice. Come to Basel, in Switzerland, for a meeting he was calling the First Zionist Congress.

About two hundred of them came, from seventeen different countries. They sat in a concert hall in their best coats.

Three men had turned an argument into a plan, and all three were in that hall. Herzl, who wrote it. Nathan Birnbaum, who had invented the word Zionism twelve years before. And Max Nordau, a famous doctor and writer who could make a crowd listen.

Then they voted. Everything they wanted fitted into one sentence.

A home for the Jewish people in Palestine, and a home allowed by law. Which meant a country of their own.

In all that voting, in all those speeches, in the whole plan they wrote down, one thing never came up. The people who were already living in Palestine.

That night Herzl wrote in his diary that he had founded the Jewish state. In five years or fifty, he said, everyone would see it.

But how do you found a state on land that already belongs to somebody else? Palestine was part of the Ottoman state, ruled from Istanbul by the Sultan. You can buy land. You cannot buy a country. So what this movement needed was a written promise from the Sultan, saying this Jewish state is allowed.

Herzl went to Istanbul and asked him for one. Then he asked again. And again, for years.

The Sultan refused every time. It was his country to govern, and he would not sign away any part of it.

Twenty years later, as the Ottoman Empire fell, a different empire would say yes. You will meet that promise at the end of this chapter.

“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man”

Max Nordau, one of the three men from that concert hall, sent two rabbis from Vienna to Palestine to have a proper look at the place. Go and see what we are working with, he told them.

They went. They came back. And the message they sent is one of the most famous sentences in this entire history.

The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.

They meant: the land is wonderful, and the land is full. Hundreds of thousands of people lived there, with their houses, their land, and their grandparents in the ground.

That warning arrived early. It was heard. And it was set aside.

Instead a slogan spread across Europe. A land without a people for a people without a land. It was simply false. Palestine was not a land without a people, and anybody who went and looked could see that.

The land that could never come back

The warning changed nothing. The buying carried on, and four years after that meeting in Basel it changed shape.

In 1901 the movement set up something new. The Jewish National Fund, the organisation you saw in the last chapter buying al-Fula from the Sursocks. Its job was to buy land in Palestine, and the rules that came with the land were the important part.

Once the Fund bought a piece of land, it belonged to the Jewish people for ever. It could never be sold again. And only Jewish workers were allowed to work on it.

Now think about what that meant for the Palestinian family living there. The day the sale went through, they lost everything at once. The right to stay in their house. The right to work the land their grandfather had cleared. The right to bring in the harvest they had already planted. By the rules of the Fund there was no place for them on that land at all, and there never could be.

Now stretch that out over fifty years. Every piece of land that changes hands is land that leaves Arab hands and never comes back.

In 1907 a scientist named Chaim Weizmann started a company in Jaffa to buy land and build on it, and within a few years the Fund owned a large stretch of farmland in the north, near Marj Ibn Amir, the valley the Sursocks had bought.

And here a second cruelty begins, quieter than the first.

You met this problem in the last chapter. Most Palestinian farmers had no paper saying the land was theirs. To them, to their faith and to their village, that land was theirs completely. But in a record book far away, the name written down was a rich landlord in Beirut or Damascus who had never even seen the place.

When one of those landlords sold, the farmers found out from a stranger standing on their land, holding a document.

You have lived here your whole life. Your father is buried over there. None of that matters now. You have thirty days to leave.

Thousands of families were pushed off their land this way, long before any war. That is how the Nakba begins. Not with soldiers. With paperwork.

In 1908 the settlers formed an armed guard to protect their villages. They called it Hashomer, the Watchman. It was the first Jewish fighting force in Palestine. Small. Nothing much yet.

Remember it anyway.

The man who saw it coming

Palestinians were not blind.

Najib Nassar was a Palestinian Christian pharmacist in Haifa who started a newspaper called Al-Carmel in 1908.

While most of his neighbours were worrying about the harvest, he got hold of the written reports from those meetings in Basel. He had them translated into Arabic, and he read every page.

Then he began printing what he had found in his newspaper.

These people are not simply coming here to live, he wrote. This is a movement with a plan to take the whole country. He called it a dagger aimed at the heart of the Arabs.

His neighbours told him he was worrying about nothing.

Everything he warned about came true. It just took another forty years, and by then it was far too late to stop.

The canal, and why Britain cared

Now go back forty years. You saw in the last chapter why Britain already had its eye on this coast: it was the road to India. In 1869 that road got very much shorter.

A new waterway called the Suez Canal opened in Egypt, and it let ships sail from Britain to India in weeks instead of months. Suddenly the land around it was worth a great deal.

Almost everything the British Empire ran on travelled that way. Soldiers, food, letters, orders. And within fifteen years Britain had taken control of Egypt, mainly to make sure nobody else could ever control the canal.

Now look at a map. Palestine sits just above the canal, so whoever holds Palestine can guard it or threaten it. And Palestine is the bridge between the Arab countries of Asia and the Arab countries of Africa.

So Britain began to think hard about who should be living there.

British officials worried that one day all those Arab countries might join together into a single strong country. If that happened, they could tell Britain to leave Egypt, and Britain would have to go.

But suppose the people living on that bridge were newcomers from Europe instead. People who needed Britain’s protection, and who had no reason to join the Arabs around them. Then the two halves of the Arab world could never become one, and the canal would stay in British hands.

That was the idea. Britain never hid it. Its own officials wrote it down in their own letters and signed their own names. One of them wrote it to the Sultan in 1840, as you saw in the last chapter. Another wrote it again in 1915, two years before the promise you are about to meet.

A world war, and three promises

In 1914 the world went to war.

The Ottoman state fought on Germany’s side. That put Britain and France at war with the Muslim caliphate that Palestine was part of, and everybody understood what that meant. If Britain won, Britain would get to redraw the map of the whole region.

Over the next two years Britain made three different promises about that same land, to three different groups of people.

Promise one. Britain went to Sharif Hussein of Mecca and asked the Arabs to rise up against the Ottoman state. In return, Britain promised that the Arabs would have their own independent country afterwards. The two sides wrote ten letters working out the details.

Hidden in those letters was one confusing sentence about which areas were not included. Years later Britain would claim that sentence had left Palestine out all along. The Arabs said that was nonsense. If Britain had meant to keep Palestine out of the deal, Britain could simply have written the word Palestine. In ten letters, Britain never once wrote it.

A promise that important does not end up that blurry by accident.

The Arabs kept their side. In 1916 they rose up and fought. They blew up the railway the Ottoman army depended on, and they tied down tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers who would otherwise have been fighting the British somewhere else. Arab men died doing it, because Britain had promised them a country.

Promise two. That same year, in secret, one British official and one French official sat down with a map and divided the same region between their two countries. Britain takes this part. France takes that part. No Arab was told. No Arab was in the room. The deal is called Sykes-Picot, after those two men, and the lines they drew that day are still on the map today.

Promise three is the one this whole story hangs on.

Sixty-seven words

First, meet Herbert Samuel. He was a British politician, he was Jewish, he believed in the Zionist plan, and he had a seat inside Britain’s government. In 1915 he passed round a secret paper called The Future of Palestine, telling the British government what it should do. It argued three things.

One. Britain should take Palestine for the British Empire.

Two. Jewish people should be allowed to move there.

Three. Over the years, a Jewish majority should be allowed to build up.

And do you know what he called the people already living in the country? He wrote that this future Jewish majority would grow up among the “muhammadans of Arab race”.

Not Palestinians. Not a nation. Not even a people. Just a religion and a race stuck together, standing in for almost everybody in the country.

Britain did exactly what his paper asked for. And then Britain sent Samuel himself to Palestine to carry it out.

Then came the letter.

On 2 November 1917 a senior British minister named Arthur Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community, and a member of the same banking family as the French Rothschild who paid for those first thirty Jewish villages in Palestine.

The letter was short. One sentence in it did all the work, and that sentence was sixty-seven words long.

Britain was in favour of turning Palestine into a national home for the Jewish people, it said, and Britain would do its best to make that happen.

That letter is called the Balfour Declaration. Balfour signed it, but the whole British government had agreed to it first. This was not one man’s idea.

It is one of the strangest promises ever made. One country was promising a second country’s land to a third group of people.

And not just any land. This was the Blessed Land, and Al-Aqsa, the first qiblah, stood on it.

Britain did not own Palestine. Britain had not even captured Palestine yet. The people living there were not asked, not warned, and not named.

They are in the letter, though. Sort of.

It says that nothing should be done to harm the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

That was nine out of every ten people in the country. Six hundred thousand of them. Farmers, teachers, doctors, imams, priests, a whole living society. And Britain’s official way of describing them was to say what they were not.

No name. No country. And the only rights the letter bothers to mention are the right to worship and the right to go about daily life. Not one word about ruling their own land.

Britain had no right to give that land away. Not a legal right, and not a moral one.

Plenty of people said so at the time, and well known historians have said so ever since. It happened anyway.

A month later the men who had worked to get that letter written held a dinner in London to celebrate it. No Palestinian had even been told the letter existed.

The general walks in

On 11 December 1917, British soldiers took Jerusalem. Their commander, General Edmund Allenby, climbed down off his horse and walked in through the Jaffa Gate on foot.

That was planned. A famous photograph came out of it, showing a modest, respectful visitor instead of a conqueror. The picture was the point.

Here is what the picture left out.

Al-Quds had been in Muslim hands since the year 637, when Umar ibn al-Khattab came to it peacefully, by agreement, and gave the Christians of the city a written promise that their churches and their lives were safe. The Crusaders took the city in 1099 and killed their way through the streets. Salah ad-Din won it back in 1187, and he did not do the same. He let the beaten Crusaders walk out of the city alive, and he left their churches standing.

Apart from one short spell in the 1200s, the city stayed in Muslim care from Salah ad-Din’s day until this December afternoon. Seven hundred and thirty years, ended by a man walking through a gate while the cameras watched.

And nobody in Britain pretended this was just a change of government. British newspapers treated it as Christian Europe finally winning the war the Crusaders had lost. For eight hundred years European armies had tried to hold this city and had always failed in the end. Now a British general held it. The Prime Minister called it a Christmas present for the British people.

A present. Somebody else’s city, with Al-Aqsa standing in the middle of it.

Four hundred years of Ottoman rule ended that afternoon. So did something a great deal older than the Ottomans.

Marching in with the British was a Jewish unit, and two men in it will come back later in this story. David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who would become the hardest voice in the movement.

In the last chapter, back in 1840, there were about three thousand Jews in all of Palestine. On this December afternoon there were roughly fifty thousand, about one person in ten, alongside around six hundred thousand Arabs.

Out in the villages, farmers heard that the war was over and a new government had come. Some were relieved, and they had reason to be. The last years of the war had been terrible. Hunger. Heavy taxes. Ottoman officers taking village boys away to fight.

But being relieved is not the same as being glad. The rulers who had gone were Muslims. The ones who had arrived were not, and they had a letter in their pocket.

The farmers did not know about the letter.